Walter Scott

"Fight on, brave knights! Man dies, but glory lives!" Banished from England for seeking to marry against his father's wishes, Ivanhoe joins Richard the Lion Heart on a crusade in the Holy Land. On his return, his passionate desire is to be reunited with the beautiful but forbidden lady Rowena, but he soon finds himself playing a more dangerous game as he is drawn into a bitter power struggle between the noble King Richard and his evil and scheming brother John. The first of Scott's novels to address a purely English subject, Ivanhoe is set in a highly romanticized medieval world of tournaments and sieges, chivalry and adventure where dispossessed Saxons are pitted against their Norman overlords, and where the historical and fictional seamlessly merge.This volume is based on the acclaimed Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels whose first edition was drawn from Scott's original text. It contains an introduction that examines Scott's use of history in the light of contemporary ideas, a chronology, bibliography, glossary and extensive notes.

An alternative cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.When young Francis Osbaldistone discovers that his vicious and scheming cousin Rashleigh has designs both on his father's business and his beloved Diana Vernon, he turns in desperation to Rob Roy for help. Chieftain of the MacGregor clan, Rob Roy is a brave and fearless man, able and cunning. But he is also an outlaw with a price on his head, and as he and Francis join forces to pursue Rashleigh, he is constantly aware that he, too, is being pursued—and could be captured at any moment.Set on the eve of the 1715 Jacobite uprising, Rob Roy brilliantly evokes a Scotland on the verge of rebellion, blending historical fact and a novelist's imagination to create an incomparable portrait of intrigue, rivalry and romance.

Waverley is set during the Jacobite Rising of 1745, which sought to restore the Stuart dynasty in the person of Charles Edward Stuart (or 'Bonnie Prince Charlie'). It relates the story of a young dreamer and English soldier, Edward Waverley, who was sent to Scotland in 1745. He journeys North from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England (alleged in an English Heritage notice to refer to Waverley Abbey in Surrey) first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the 1745 Jacobite uprising and aftermath.

The Talisman is Sir Walter Scott's tale of the Crusades -- a tale of chivalry, of violence, of virtue, romance, and deceit. In Scott's own words: ...the warlike character of Richard I, wild and generous, a pattern of chivalry, with all its extravagant virtues, and its no less absurd errors, was opposed to that of Saladin, in which the Christian and English monarch showed all the cruelty and violence of an Eastern sultan, and Saladin, on the other hand, displayed the deep policy and prudence of a European sovereign, whilst each contended which should excel the other in the knightly qualities of bravery and generosity. This singular contrast afforded, as the author conceived, materials for a work of fiction possessing peculiar interest.

This is a story of national change and personal tragedy. For Lucy Ashton and Edgar Ravenswood, acts of heroism are thwarted and love is doomed by social, political and historical division. This edition restores the action to the years of uncertainty and political flux before the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, rather than after, as Scott's later revision had placed it.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A kindly heart had brave Fitz-James;Fast poured his eyes at pity's claims,And now, with mingled grief and ire,He saw the murdered maid expire."God, in my need, be my relief,As I wreak this on yonder Chief!"- from The Lady of the LakeWildly successful with readers and critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1810, this is Scott's renowned romantic poem about love and honor amidst a bitter rivalry between King James V and the powerful Douglas family.This revised edition, published in 1899, features an extensive introduction that places Scott and his writings in historical and literary context, as well as explanatory notes, study guides, and suggested selections for class or book-group readings. Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), a literary hero of his native land, turned to writing only when his law practice and printing business foundered. Among his most beloved works are Rob Roy (1818), and Ivanhoe (1820). American writer William Vaughn Moody (1869 - 1910) served as co-editor of the Harvard Monthly and assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago. He authored several verse plays, books of poetry, and histories and criticisms of English literature.

Quentin Durward (1823), Scott's first "European" novel, was an experiment in transferring the historical romance to foreign soil. Fifteenth-century France, the French Revolution, and contemporary Britain all come together in this sharp-eyed novel of political expediency and intrigue.The young Scottish adventurer Quentin Durward embarks upon a dangerous journey through the forest of the Ardennes seeking a name, a partner, and a position in the world. Meanwhile, the machiavellian King Louis XI of France, maneuvers his realm out of the hands of feudal barons and into centralized control - which Scott believed to characterize the modern state.

Early in 1817 Scott received in an unsigned letter the seed of The Heart of Mid-Lothian and began immediately to shape from historical fact the story of Jeanie Deans, a dairymaid who, while refusing to lie to save her sister’s life, journeys to London to beg for a reprieve. Set in the 1730s in a Scotland uneasily united with England, the novel dramatizes different kinds of justice: that meted out by the Edinburgh mob in the lynching of one Captain Porteous, and that encountered by a young girl on trial for infanticide.A bestseller from Philadelphia to St. Petersburg, an inspiration to succeeding novelists from Balzac to George Eliot, The Heart of Mid-Lothian is the seventh and finest of Scott’s ‘Waverley’ novels. This edition, based on the first edition of 1818, incorporates many new corrections from the manuscript and from other sources.Tony Inglis provides a full introduction to the historical background, and to the novel’s rich use of language and dialect, its themes and narrative modes.

In this exciting novel, the legend of Amy Robsart and her secret marriage to the Earl of Leicester comes alive in a blend of historical fact and fanciful fiction.

Robin Hood, brief version for children

The third novel in the Waverley series, and Scott's personal favorite, The Antiquary centers on a young man called Lovel who meets Jonathan Oldbuck, a loquacious old antiquary, on a trip to Scotland. There Lovel falls in love with the daughter of Sir Arthur Wardour, a local landowner. However, with no wealth or title to offer, Lovel's feelings go unrequited until an extraordinary act of courage. With its vivid drama and exuberant pace, The Antiquary confirms Scott's reputation as the great storyteller of modern Europe.

Guy Mannering is an astrologer who only half-believes in his art. Instead he places his faith in patriarchal power, wealth and social position.But the Scotland of this novel is a nation in which the old hierarchies are breaking down and Guy must learn the limits of the nabob's authority in a society in which each social group - from gypsies and smugglers, to Edinburgh lawyers, landowners and Border store farmers - lives by its own laws.

Perhaps the finest and certainly the most readable of Scott's Waverley novels, Old Mortality is a swift-moving historical romance that pits an anachronistically liberal hero against the forces of fanaticism in seventeenth-century Scotland - the period notorious as "the killing time." Its central character, Henry Morton, finds himself torn between his love for a royalist's granddaughter and his loyalty to his oppressed countrymen.

In ill health following a stroke, Sir Walter Scott wrote Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft at the behest of his son-in-law, J. G. Lockhart, who worked for a publishing firm. The book proved popular and Scott was paid six hundred pounds, which he desperately needed (despite his success as a novelist, Scott was almost ruined when the Ballantyne publishing firm, where he was a partner, went bankrupt in 1826).Letters was written when educated society believed itself in enlightened times due to advances in modern science. The book, however, revealed that all social classes still held beliefs in ghosts, witches, warlocks, fairies, elves, diabolism, the occult, and even werewolves. Sourcing from prior sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on demonology along with contemporary accounts from England, Europe, and North America (Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi, for one), Scott's discourses on the psychological, religious, physical, and preternatural explanations for these beliefs are essential reading for acolytes of the dark and macabre; the letters dealing with witch hunts, trials (Letters Eight and Nine), and torture are morbidly compelling.Scott was neither fully pro-rational modernity nor totally anti-superstitious past, as his skepticism of one of the "new" sciences (skullology, as he calls it) is made clear in a private letter to a friend. Thus, Letters is both a personal and intellectual examination of conflicting belief systems, when popular science began to challenge superstition in earnest.

Set on the eve of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, The Monastery is full of supernatural events, theological conflict, and humor. Located in the lawless Scottish Borders, the novel depicts the monastery of Kennaquhair (a thinly disguised Melrose Abbey, whose ruins are still to be seen near Scott's own home at Abbotsford) on the verge of dissolution and the fortunes of two brothers as they respond to a new social and religious order.

The Pirate is a novel written by Walter Scott in 1822. It is set in the Shetland Islands, Scotland, which Scott visited. Murdaunt, the only son Mertoun has, sets sail for the islands to have a new life, but Mertoun hides his ghostly past as 'captain devil', a malevolent pirate who sailed through the Atlantic Ocean looting Spanish ships and Dutch.

Set in the mid-eighteenth century in the fictitious third Jacobite rebellion, Redgauntlet (1824) tells of Darsie Latimer, a student of law who becomes embroiled in a plot to put Prince Charles Edward (aka, Bonnie Prince Charlie) on the British throne. The events in Redgauntlet never actually took place, but they are probable, and form the culmination of Scott's series of Jacobite novels.

The story is set just after the Union of Scotland and England (1707), in the Liddesdale hills of the Scottish Borders, familiar to Scott from his work collecting ballads for The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. The main character is based on David Ritchie, whom Scott met in the autumn of 1797. In the tale, the dwarf is Sir Edward Mauley, a hermit regarded by the locals as being in league with the Devil, who becomes embroiled in a complex tale of love, revenge, betrayal, Jacobite schemes and a threatened forced marriage.Scott began the novel well, "but tired of the ground I had trode so often before... I quarrelled with my story, & bungled up a conclusion." Critics and public found it poor in comparison with its popular companion Old Mortality. One of the harshest reviews was in the Quarterly Review, written anonymously by Scott himself.The introduction to The Black Dwarf attributes the work to Jedediah Cleishbotham, whom Scott had invented as a fictional editor of the Landlord series. It is here that we have the most complete view of this character.

The Fair Maid of Perth centres on the merchant classes of Perth in the fourteenth century, and their commitment to the pacific values of trade, in a bloody and brutal era in which no right to life is recognised, in which the Scottish nobles fight for control of the weak Scottish monarchy, and clans are prepared to extinguish each other to gain supremacy in the central Highlands. It is a remarkable novel, in part because late in his career Scott has a new subject, and in part because he employs a spare narrative style that is without parallel in the rest of his oeuvre. Far too many critics, from his son-in-law J.G. Lockhart to the present day, have written off late Scott, and seen his last works as evidence of failing powers. Find Out What Scott Really Wrote - by going back to the original manuscripts, a team of scholars has uncovered what Scott originally wrote and intended his public to read before errors, misreadings and expurgations crept in during production.

When General Browne's friend invites him to spend the week at his home, he's delighted to oblige—that is, until he spends a night in the tapestried chamber.

"On pleasant knolls, under trees, and by the banks of Yarrow, many lines were written," the author told his son-in-law.

The Betrothed is the first of two Tales of the Crusaders. The action takes place in the Welsh Marches during the latter part of the reign of Henry II, after 1187. Eveline, the 16-year-old daughter of Sir Raymond Berenger, is rescued from a Welsh siege by the forces of Damian Lacy. She is betrothed to his uncle, Sir Hugo, who leaves on a crusade. Rebels led by Ranald Lacy attempt to kidnap her, and Damian fights them off, but a confused sequence of events convinces the King that she and her beloved are in league against him.

This short story is based on an account Scott had heard many years previously of the trial and execution in Carlisle of a Highland cattle drover accused of the murder of an English drover. Scott's source, which he acknowledged in the 'Magnum Opus' edition of Chronicles of the Canongate (1831), was George Constable (1719 - 1803), a friend of his father and the model for Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary. It has not been established to date whether Constable's anecdote refers to a historically verifiable case.

Now, if to these were added the diverse reall phantasms seen at Whitehall in Cromwell’s times, which caused him to keep such mighty guards in and about his bedchamber, and yet so oft to change his lodgings; if those things done at St. James’, where the devil so joal’d the centinels against the sides of the queen’s chappell doors, that some of them fell sick upon it; and others, not, taking warning by it, kild one outright, whom they buried in the place; and all other such dreadful things, those that inhabited the royal houses have been affrighted with.

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"The course of life to which Mary and her little retinue were doomed, was in the last degree secluded and lonely, varied only as the weather permitted or rendered impossible the Queen's usual walk in the garden, or on the battlements." - from The Abbot.They were the literary phenomenon of their time: The Waverly novels, 48 volumes set in fanciful re-creations of the Scottish Highlands (and other lands) of centuries past, published between 1814 and 1831 and devoured by a reading public hungry for these sweeping, interconnected melodramas. The series popularized historical fiction, though they're also abundant in astute political and social commentary. The Abbot, Volume 21 of Waverley, follows directly on from The Monastery (Volume 18) and features a vividly depicted Mary Queen of Scots during the time of her imprisonment at Lochleven Castle.Scottish novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), a literary hero of his native land, turned to writing only when his law practice and printing business foundered. Among his most beloved works are The Lady of the Lake (1810), Rob Roy (1818), and Ivanhoe (Waverley Volumes 16 and 17) (1820).

One of Sir Walter Scott’s most celebrated and accessible works, The Lay of the Last Minstrel was a huge publishing phenomenon when it first appeared in 1802, with six editions appearing in three years years and sales of 27,000 in a decade. Its impact on Border tourism was vast, as countless people, moved by Scott’s evocative description of the moonlit Melrose Abbey, flocked to the area. Painters too were inspired by the scene, and such was its fame that even prime minister William Pit recited sections from it in front of dinner guests.Told by an ageing minstrel to Ann, Duchess of Buccleuch in return for hospitality at Newark Castle, The Lay of the Last Minstrel is a powerful and dramatic tale concerning love, murder and kidnapping. A strong supernatural element lies at its heart, making it one of the most significant gothic tales ever written.This edition features an introduction by the Duke of Buccleuch.

A party on the Highland Tour comes upon a miserable hut hidden away among a patch of cliffs. Upon inquiring about what lies before them, the ladies hear the wretched tale of Elspat MacTavish, the Highland Widow, who is condemned forever to live penitent and alone. After the suppression of the Highland clans, the widow’s son, Hamish, sets off with honorable intentions of joining the coalition on its campaign against the French into America. But soon the unfortunate Hamish finds himself tricked by his own mother. The ensuing events produce a tragic ending made all the more pathetic by the unquenchable passion of a once-proud nation that continues to beat in the breast of one woman.

‘Here is a plot without a drop of blood; and all the elements of a romance, without its conclusion’, comments the King towards the end of Scott’s longest, and arguably most intriguing, novel. Set against the backdrop of the Popish Plot to overturn Charles II, Peveril of the Peak explores the on-going tensions between Cavalier and Puritan loyalties during the fraught years of Restoration England. Ranging from Derbyshire to the Isle of Man and culminating in London it is a novel which interweaves political intrigue, personal responsibilities and the ways in which the forces of history are played out in the struggles of individual human lives. But its true subject is perhaps the role of narration and the limits of storytelling itself. In this, the first scholarly edition of Peveril , Alison Lumsden recovers a lost novel.

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